The effects of chiropractic care in Alzheimer's patients

This is a crossover study, where individuals act as their own control. There are two sessions, one intervention session and one control session. The intervention is a single session of chiropractic care. The control session consists of passive head movements. Both sessions will take approximately ten minutes. Chiropractic assessment: The entire spine and both sacroiliac joints will be assessed for vertebral subluxation, and manipulated/adjusted where deemed necessary, by a registered chiropractor. The clinical indicators that will be used to assess the function of the spine prior to and after each chiropractic adjustment session include assessing for tenderness to palpation of the relevant joints, manually palpating for restricted intersegmental range of motion, assessing for palpable asymmetric intervertebral muscle tension, and any abnormal or blocked joint play and end-feel of the joints. All of these biomechanical characteristics are used by the chiropractors as clinical indicators of vertebral subluxations and vary between individuals, depending on their subluxation indicators. All of the spinal adjustments carried out in this study will be high-velocity, low-amplitude thrusts to the spine or pelvic joints. These are standard adjustment techniques used by chiropractors. The mechanical properties of this intervention has been investigated; and although the actual force applied to the subject's spine depends on the chiropractor, the patient, and the spinal location of the adjustment, the general shape of the force-time history of spinal adjustments is very consistent and the duration of the thrust is always less than 200 milliseconds. The high velocity type of adjustments chosen specifically because previous research has shown that reflex electromyographic activation observed after adjustments only occurred after high velocity, low amplitude adjustments (as compared with lower velocity mobilizations). This adjustment technique has also been previously used in studies that have investigated the neurophysiological effects of chiropractic care. Within 30 minutes of receiving the intervention the participant will be reassessed using the same outcome measurement procedures. The participants will then be reassessed after a 7 day washout period with the alternate intervention applied between pre/post assessments.